MICHAŁ BRZEZIŃSKI :: FAKE ART

[text=center]FAKE ART[/text]
Michał Brzeziński is an artist faithful to the medium of video, who has been strivingfor a decade to restore the art of video to the position of experimental art and who hasnegated attempts at adapting and appropriating it to the role imposed by the context of thetraditional visual arts. He attempts to discover new elements both in the montage and invisual aesthetics of this medium. The present exhibition constitutes another breakthroughin his creative output which has generated many a controversy so far. Since thesecontroversies are not political but aesthetic in nature, his works are a far cry from scandal-seeking and populism. However, in the artistic context, this show is truly ‘volcanic’ and,
following subsequent eruptions of Brzeziński’s ideas, the intellectual landscape is swept offthe surface and the defining of a new aesthetic space commences.
It may seem that works so saturated with intellectual ideas must remain dry and distant.Brzeziński, however, by making his ideological revolution, reinstates art as cool, expressive,intriguing, striking or maybe even slick. In this sense, his idea may permeate the viewers’mind organically without causing an avant-garde aversion to the artistic artifact whichplays a subordinate role to the idea. Slickness is thus a kind of a communicative interfacewhich stirs imagination or emotions, a form of invocation.
What does the idea of the FAKE ART exhibition consist in? The nature of art, accordingto Brzeziński, lies in the sign. The sign is the material means (the medium) and the objectto which it refers (meaning). Digital video, though, does not have the characteristicstypical for other media (a pixel is not a feature of vector graphics, image flatness is nota feature of a 3D image, and each image may be printed or projected in various ways.)Thus, it is features of the final form of presentation, not features of the digital image,that constitute artifacts and visible features. In this respect, the digital image is a perfectpotentiality: its characteristic feature is a lack of features. Brzeziński has coined the termof ‘d-effect’ in order to render the double relationship between an effect and a defect, toundermine ‘failure’ aesthetics by introducing the term of ‘fake’.
What consequences does it bring to the digital image aesthetics? Media art has traditionallyequated the meaning with the medium, exploring aesthetic properties of the medium.Tautological forms have been created which, supposedly, refer the meaning to the mediumitself. Fake art aims to transcend this construction and refer digital image to other mediasince digital video lacks intrinsic features and cannot naively refer to itself. In this respect,the idea of art according to Brzeziński thus approaches the classic situation known fromfigurative art which depicts external meanings in the medium, for instance, a deer paintedon canvas using oil paint or a light projection on the wall. Classic art also equates the formwith the content. Brzeziński reinstates the sign in the digital era. Instead of simulating thedeer or depicting the medium itself, FAKE ART strives to falsify other media. With the useof one medium, it visualizes impossible constructions of another medium, uses irony andgenerates absurd research results.
For example, Brzeziński simulates an explosion of gold nano-particles or a process ofbacterial incubation which is calculated in 3D space on the basis of a DNA code of a fluvirus. From the scientific point of view, these constitute absurd actions, non-existent innature, neither discovering nor depicting the truth about the world. Nevertheless, in thecontext of art, they acquire an aesthetic, often metaphorical or symbolical dimension.Structures of this type, which infect science and transform it into art, are actualisations ofconceptual art. Processing of objects, images and artifacts of the cognitive process aims toblur the obviousness of conclusions drawn and sometimes to fabricate theories that wouldhave a social, political, religious or even mystical dimension. This dimension, however, willonly come into being as a result of interpreting a fraudulent fact.